"Even trash has become worthless."
Tian Wengui, who collects refuse for recycling in Beijing.
[As quoted in the New York Times]

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Made for you and me

The last week has been made purposeful, thoughtful and tuneful by folkalley.com's constant side-stream dedicated to the songs of Woody Guthrie.

That's it, really. Anybody and everybody who might have pursued the rest of this entry should be now have switched. Why haven't you?__________________________________________________________________

The pretext for this Guthrie stream is a bit tendentious: it is based around last week (14th July) being the man's 95th birthday (except, of course, he died in 1967).

Hell, who needs an occasion to wallow in the songs? Like the air we breathe: they're just there. They are the shorthand to a way of clear, clean, decent thinking and being.

Another site, dedicated to Guthrie, will tell you all you don't know yet about his life and his work. It has a quotation from another of Malcolm's constant companions, John Steinbeck:

Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who still listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.

Who he?

Malcolm featured in the columns of "Trinity News", the student weekly of Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1960s.
He worked in public education. He was a borough councillor and parliamentary candidate. He retired. He was bored. He blogged.